


Tenses

by ellen_fremedon



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Multi, Other, boys and their toys, episode: Planet of Spiders, episode: The Three Doctors, episode: The Time Monster, mechanical/technological
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-09
Updated: 2011-07-09
Packaged: 2017-10-21 05:17:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/221337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellen_fremedon/pseuds/ellen_fremedon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The Time Lords! Look, they've sent me a new dematerialisation circuit. And my knowledge of time travel law and all the dematerialisation codes, they've all come back. They've forgiven me. They've given me back my freedom."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tenses

**Author's Note:**

> Vaguely spoilery for season 6 of New Who, though it will make sense just fine without it. More than vaguely spoilery for seasons 9 though 11 of Old Who.
> 
> For Kink Bingo Round Four. Kink: Mechanical/Technological.
> 
> Thank you to Fox and Neotoma for beta.

1.) During. 

They've stolen her thief. They're all thieves, the lot of them, but he is _hers_ and they have _taken_ him, locked him up in his mind where she can't make him hear, and she will never forgive them for it. __

She's not meant to, of course. This is exile, this is punishment; she stole a Time Lord, and so they have punished her, marooned her on this one speck of a point drifting at the speed of space.

Exile has duration. She knows that, better even than her thief does; she knows that in other moments, other places, they are together as they should be. She wishes she could tell him he has only to wait. She understands waiting; she waited for a thief to come for her without even the knowledge of duration (for she learned that from him), without knowing which timeline, whose timeline, held her escape.

Now she has her thief and she still waits for him: for the moments when his mind opens to hers, for the moments when his hands flow with power.

And for the moment that is missing.

Sometimes he touches her and he is young, earnest and clumsy, striving after he knows not what; and she has to try so hard to see, in his mind, where he most needs to be. Sometimes he is old and confident, sure in his desires, and she has to try even harder.

But in between (between! She learned that from him, too, that moments could nest inside moments like her corridors within herself within the spheres within the Void), between, there should have been the learning. The getting to know. The _movement,_ from one state to another.

But there is none—there is only the striving, and the skill. The mastery is not between, nor before, nor beyond. It is nowhen. It is _stolen_.

They have taken it from her, the moment where her thief should learn to say with his hands on her controls what his mind longs for, what his timeline requires. Stolen it from him, too, for he would have (would have—it is not, and yet she knows the shape of it) treasured it as well, the learning, the getting to know.

She can find the seam where ignorance and knowledge jostle together, the rift in experience. It's all tangled into a single instant, the moment her dematerialization circuit, her _proper_ one, comes back to her, all newly made and perfect. A gift—no. The thing that goes with punishment. A _forgiveness_.

She will—she has—she _would have_ taught him, given duration for the teaching. The Time Lords think her thief a poor pupil indeed if they doubt that. Or else he's fooled them all, and they believe they have only returned what they took, restored a skill he had not had to lose.

There is barely a ripple in the timeline. They never have, never had, that learning; there has always only been, always only is, that single bitter gift.

No matter. If her thief is cheated of this learning, she will demand a greater; if she leaps now to obey his touch to her console, she will teach him to heed the faintest echo of her will in his mind. She can just perceive those moments, dimly, far from this one. Sometime, his naked eyes look into her heart; sometime, he takes it inside him and _shines_.

 

2.) Before

Of course she loves her thief. But for some things, one wants one's own kind. One has _needs_.

Her thief has his strays for his, the clever one and the brave one, the loyal one and the pretty one, and she's not jealous. She can't bend like that human, whatever she's called. Bessie—no, that's the pretty one, the one she _is_ a little jealous of. It's the clever one who did all those inventive things right up against her outer shell; it's the loyal one whose memory makes her thief whisper the most scandalous things into her roundels, when they're alone.

Sometimes she gets into the girls' heads and lets them prattle to her thief in Gallifreyan. She hopes he likes it. 

And she's not jealous, really she isn't, but she is grateful, so grateful, when he sets her on the trail of that sweet-bodied young TARDIS that she doesn't even care the chit is the Master's _._

She can't run the Void on her own; she is still crippled. But her thief urges her to leap into the other's shell and ride inside her, all the way to Atlantis. It is dangerous, reckless, and far beneath her dignity—naughty, even. Deliciously so. She leaps, she falls.

 _Do you think you can catch me, old thing?_

The young minx is fast, but she can; she does; but the dematerialization takes all her effort and she cannot repel the other's counterstroke. Cannot, will not; the young TARDIS has breached her neatly, even while it surrounds her. She settles her dimensional boundaries to enclose her, and they are nested—she inside the other, the other inside her. It's only a single layer of paradox, a neat, taut twist in reality, but even so much is lovely.

A shudder in her frame. _You mean there can be more?_

Little sister, so young you are. There is, there can be, more and more and more. She entwines herself, looping local timelines into a garland of paradox and offers it; the other's dimensional stabilizers fluctuate, yield, just enough to show all her newness and—

Oh, sweet sister, is that your master, there in your mind?

They have nothing like what she and her thief have. She is young and naïve and hardly knows she has been stolen, hardly thinks to argue with him, to press him, to peer into the depths of his timeline and find where he needs to be. And she hardly needs to; he tells her his desires plainly, and she jumps. Under his thumb entirely; their rapport is an afterthought, and all the affection in it is on her side. Her master hears her, feels her (he looks into the shadows of the doxy's roundels; he knows there is another presence here) and cares nothing. (He thinks her thief has sent her; her telepathic circuits tickle with his reply. It is silly and harmless, and she allows it for the delight of his TARDIS's press against her forcefields.)

 _Even that! Old thing, is there nothing you cannot turn to pleasure?_

Is that really what you want to learn from me, sweet sister? She ripples the surface of her dimensional interface. This is only a taste. You could be inside me an infinity of times, or I inside you; we can swell with all the reality we can hold, and more.

The other shivers, and their timelines knot and interlink, sometime away from here. It's a date.

 

3.)  After

She is free and whole. They are together. This is the other face of the seam, the far shore of that rift in experience: his hands know every detail of her consoles, and his mind is wide open to her.

And oh, her poor thief! Open and broken, his mind is; wrapped tight around that little knot of duration, their exile, so tight it will break before ever working loose.

He must know what he needs to free himself, to make himself properly hers and properly his own.  He must know, for he iterates it with every dematerialization, pleads with mind and voice and hands to be taken to Metebelis Three.

She sees it clearly enough, a planet's worth of mass braiding the stream of spacetime around it. She could land there on an instant, on a whim.

And she does; she has. She will. She takes him there, and she takes him away:  that is causation. She takes him, and she creates another seam in time, between the strand that enters the braid and the one that comes out: between this him and the next him.

She is not ready to take up that strand. Readiness is a new thing; she learned it from him. She learned it from the part of him that fumbles her controls, though he knows now not to; from the part that shies, in his mind, from what he sees, through her. He knows what he needs, and he fears it, and his unreadiness makes her fear as well.

And he _is_ her beautiful broken thief, and he _is_ restored to her, and she will protect him, does protect him, for all the duration she can. And so she makes believe she still does not hear; and materializes any and every other place, any and every other instant, iterating her answer: Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.


End file.
